Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Every developer has his own set of preferred tools. Me too. In my case all these tools are Java oriented because is the language I use more often. Obviously these are not the best tools you can find on internet, I'm sure you use other tools better and you hate my tools, but they gave me so many satisfactions that I think my work can't be finished without them. Too bad uh?

Eclipse: "naaaaaaaaaaa, no way" maybe you think. I understand people complaining this fantastic IDE, but I am in love with this tool. I tried all IntelliJ, Netbeans, etc. and I think I know Eclipse so well that I can face any problem that it can have, I accept it's buggy due to the free plugins we install all the time.

CheckStyle: the best tool to detect coding standard violations. I use it inside Eclipse of course.

UCDetector: Unused Code Detector. When your project it's really big you notice a lot of code that it is not being used. You can remove it automatically with proguard, but the best option is to delete it. Less code, less problems. This free Eclipse plugin will do the hard work for you, with many options, and allowing to remove multiple things with quickfix.

ASM Bytecode Plugin: amazing plugin to see the java bytecode in real time. Sometimes when you want to improve something it is good to check the bytecode, you will get some nice surprises. You can change the code, but the bytecode could be exactly the same or even worst.

Lint: checks for problems in Android projects. It is included in the android SDK and the ADT plugin.

Total Commander: wtf? This is not for java. Of course not, it is only THE file commander. Extremely powerful, and with lot of free plugins. It's for windows only but I use it with "wine" in MacOS. If you create a plugin the author will send you a personal license for free! Thanks Ghisler, you made me happy on christmas ;)